2003 was a strange year for genre television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer finished its run that May after seven seasons, Angel had a single year left in it, and for the rest of that year the networks were visibly trying to work out what the audience those two shows had built actually wanted next. What they came up with was a run of supernatural dramas pitched directly at the people who had grown up on the horror shows of the mid-nineties and then graduated to Sunnydale. Almost none of them lasted more than two seasons. The three below are the ones worth going back for, and two of them cannot be watched legally in the United States at any price, which is a peculiar thing to have to write about television made in the twenty-first century. All three premiered inside the same nine months, which is less a coincidence than a description of how quickly the networks were moving.
None of these is horror in the slasher sense. They are supernatural dramas with a body count and a melancholy streak, which is what the post-Buffy networks understood the format to be, and the register sits closer to grief than to fright. That is also a large part of why they struggled. A show about a woman who hears the dead asking her for help is a difficult thing to sell inside a thirty-second Thursday night promo, and all three ran into some version of that problem. They are counted down below with their episode totals, along with what happened to each one and where, if anywhere, it can actually be found. The answers to that last part are considerably worse than shows of this vintage have any right to expect, and they are most of the reason this is worth writing rather than a straightforward nostalgia exercise, and the reason two of them still have people campaigning on their behalf.
Bryan Fuller‘s first series is the most watchable thing here and by some distance the easiest to find. Georgia Lass, eighteen years old and thoroughly unimpressed by her own life, is killed in the pilot by a toilet seat falling out of the deorbiting Mir space station, then promptly conscripted as a grim reaper working a territory in Seattle. Ellen Muth plays her and narrates, with Mandy Patinkin as Rube, the crew chief who hands out the day’s assignments on Post-it notes in a waffle house. It premiered on Showtime on June 27, 2003, ran 29 episodes across two seasons, and finished on October 31, 2004. Fuller left partway through the first season, which is the detail most people who love it would rather not know. The premise gets announced in the first five minutes and the show never once apologises for it, which is probably the single best decision anybody made on it.
The cancellation is a small mystery in its own right. Showtime cited ratings. Fuller has said he thought it was a loss of quality and a sense that the problems were not going to stop. Executives were reported at the time telling a journalist that the show pulled three times the network’s primetime average. Those three accounts do not fit together neatly, and nobody has ever reconciled them. What is not in dispute is the reputation, which climbed steadily once it was off the air, or the direct-to-DVD film that arrived in 2009 and is disliked with real feeling by the people who care most about the series. It is also the exception here on availability, streaming free with ads on Tubi and included with Prime. Anyone curious about why the next two entries sting should start here, because this is the version of the idea that actually got to finish its thought.
This is the deepest cut on the list by a wide margin. Paul Callan, played by Skeet Ulrich, investigates claimed miracles on behalf of the Catholic Church and debunks them for a living, right up until he witnesses one that refuses to debunk and joins a small paranormal research outfit run by Angus Macfadyen’s Alva Keel. Marisa Ramirez plays a former police officer who rounds out the team. Richard Hatem and Michael Petroni created it, and the tone sits far closer to The X-Files at its bleakest than to anything else ABC was putting on air in 2003. Thirteen episodes were produced in total. The network aired six of them, starting on January 27, and pulled the show on March 31 of the same year. Hatem had written The Mothman Prophecies the year before, which tells you most of what you need to know about the register he was aiming for.
What killed it was a Monday ten o’clock slot and a war. The American invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, and a new drama with no established audience kept getting preempted for news coverage at exactly the point it needed consecutive weeks on air to build one. The reviews were good. Nobody was watching, because nobody could reliably find it. The remaining seven episodes eventually premiered in Canada that November, on a network most American viewers had never heard of, and the full thirteen reached DVD later, which is the exact recipe for a fandom that stays small, fierce and permanently aggrieved. It has never reached an American streaming service at all, and a search for it turns up listings with no provider attached to them at all. Six episodes is not enough to judge a series on, which is precisely the difficulty: what people defend is largely the part they were never allowed to see.
Eliza Dushku went directly from Buffy and Angel into this, which is the single most useful piece of context for understanding what Fox thought it was buying. Tru Davies works the night shift in a city morgue, the bodies occasionally ask her for help, and the day restarts so she can try to prevent the death that put them on her table in the first place. It premiered on October 30, 2003, ran Thursdays at eight, and drew somewhere around 4.5 million viewers across its first season. The supporting cast reads remarkably well two decades on. Zach Galifianakis is in it years ahead of The Hangover, and Matthew Bomer is in it years ahead of White Collar, both of them long before anyone knew who they were. It picked up award nominations aimed squarely at a teenage audience the following year, which is a fair indication of who Fox believed was watching.
Season two is where it gets genuinely interesting and where Fox lost patience with it. Jason Priestley arrived as an antagonist working the opposite side of the same ability, ensuring deaths happened rather than preventing them, which is a properly good idea and the first real sign the show understood what it had. Fox cancelled it in 2005 six episodes into that season, leaving the mythology unresolved and the Priestley arc hanging. The finale did not air in the United States at all until Syfy ran it on January 21, 2008, three years after the cancellation, which means the ending reached its audience considerably later than the show did. It streams nowhere in the United States. A DVD set on Amazon is the only legal way to watch it. That is a strange piece of television history and a genuinely sad one, because the people still arguing about that ending waited longer to get it than they ever spent watching the show.
The thread running through all three is timing rather than quality. Each one arrived in the eighteen months after Buffy ended, each was built for an audience that had just been left without a show, and each was handed a slot or a schedule that made assembling a new audience close to impossible. Two of them were cancelled with their stories unfinished. What is genuinely strange is not that they failed, because plenty of good shows fail and these were all difficult sells. It is that twenty-three years later the rights have settled in such a way that a pair of them are harder to reach than most programming from the 1950s, a fair amount of which sits on several free services. None of the three got the thing that reliably turns a cancelled show into a permanent one, which is simply being easy to find. Availability is its own kind of afterlife, and two of these never received it.
